For reasons I won't go into here (my brother, Biggus Dickus, bought it) I have in my possession a bottle of Grey Goose vodka. This would be just fine by me, except the tea-totaling bro bought vanilla-flavored vodka, which is practically undrinkable.

This, combined with the beginning of mango season, brought me to this morning's experiment. Can I make chicken salad out of chicken shit? Or, to be more exact, if I let most of a ripe Springfels mango steep in a mason jar of vanilla vodka for a while, will it be any more drinkable?

I'm thinking mango martinis. Mango martinis, or swill. It's got to be one or the other, and since I already have swill, what do I have to lose?

This is a day off for me, and it started out lamely enough with me waking up with a headache. Like, the kind of headache that feels like someone with a fifty-pound thumb is trying to press out your eye, from behind the eyeball.
Ignoring that, I went off to work out with Nic Cage (aka The Marquis de Steve). There was no parking at the gym within a three-block radius. I circled three times. I would have gone into a four-block radius, but the fourth block is Dixie Highway or residential areas and they frown on parking in either location.

I had to valet park. At the gym. Which is so against my religion. That religion being if you're going to work out, anything that makes it easier (i.e.: parking next to the door, valet parking) is prohibited. You're there to sweat, not take it easy. And yet, due to the fact that there was absolutely no place to put Zelda Bleu, I had to valet. Which I still would not have done, had all this circling around like a shark hunting blood not made me very late.

Got home and logged on to the i-tunes music store, because there were some things I wanted to download. I shopped until I had a cart full of obscurities, then went to download and check out. No can do. Need to update to i-tunes 4.8. Not a problem. Except, it was a problem. For some reason, I can't update because, although I'm an administrator on my own computer, the stupid Wintel device thinks I need to talk to a system administrator. I even tried creating a new account that was strictly admin with no customization at all. Still won't let me update. Fatal error.

Yeah, I'll say. The fatal error being it's a piece of shit Wintel computer that I had to buy because the hospital took away my Mac and wouldn't let me use one anymore, and then gave me such a load of work that I had to get a Windows machine on my own dime so I could work at/from home, too. Then the asshats laid me off and here I am with a stupid Windows machine that I'd never in a million years have bought of my own volition.

Except. Now I don't have to use a Wintel machine, do I? And if I wanted that sweet, sweet, sweet 15" PowerBook, I could get it. And you know what that means, don't you? This Windows machine would be a doorstop faster than than you could say reboot.

The day the RLA and I viewed this house, it was raining. The glass barn doors to the pool deck were open, and the house, with its dark Dade County Pine ceiling, was as cozy as a summer camp cabin. The rain misted through the screen over the pool deck, and it was almost like it was raining inside the house.

We were thoroughly charmed, and didn't see the other things like the do-it-yourself projects that had been done poorly. We bought the house.
To this day, thirteen years later, I love this little place in the rain. I woke up this morning at six, planning on driving up to Jupiter to meet with my brother and the estate lawyer. That plan soon ended when I discovered we were in the outer squall bands from Tropical Storm Arlene.

We did a conference call instead, and I was ensconced on the sofa, coffe mug in hand, cozy little house around me.

Good thing, too, because my brother is a greedy, grabby idiot and had I not been in the zen womb of my snug little cabin, I probably would have been leaning over the lawyer's desk slapping the cowboy hat off my brother's head.

Here's the deal. I want to buy his half of the family home, so that I can live in it. He wants to sell it to me, but either wait until Mummy dies and have the house appraised then, betting on the real estate bubble still inflating, or do it now, cash in his hand and the fact that I'm only semi-employed be damned. Or, he says, if I can't scrape the bucks together, maybe we should (read "You, little sister, should") empty the house and rent it out. We could put that money aside and when Mummy dies and I'm ready to leave Miami (where I brought her to live because he couldn't be counted on to take care of her) then I can let him have all the rent as part of the payment I make to him for the house.

Heaves a sigh. Contemplates the coziness of my little house. Sips coffee. Pets dog. Waits for blood pressure to lower.

He has a wife, you know.

There's blue, and then there's something else. I'm so down, it can't be the blues, it has to be something deeper. Indigo? Ultramarine? That funny crayon that nobody ever wanted to use: Prussian Blue?
Whatever. I'm in one of those funks that even therapy shopping can't help. Of course, it's hard to therapy shop when even a box of colored pens is equal to a whole day's (as opposed to an hour's) wages.

Nevertheless, it hasn't stopped me. I went on a mini-spree over at Think Geek this morning.

Tell me that this isn't one of the funniest things you've seen in ages. I think that it's right up there with the old Godzilla fire wire hub.

Anyway.

Tonight is the big season premiere of Queer Eye, and they are making over the Boston Red Sox. Anything that shows Johnny Damon is a good thing, excess facial hair notwithstanding.

I'm off to mall world, sweetiedarlings, wish me well in the world of acquisitions.

Due to stupidity on my part, comments have been turned off for a couple of weeks. I have now turned them back on. Feel free to leave one.

Working in a mall store has caused the scales to be removed from my eyes. The state of civilization in America has deteriorated to degrees I never imagined in my safe little ivory tower of public, not-for-profit service.
Item the first:

The posture of American youth is appalling. I have never been exposed to such slouching and round shoulders, ever. I spend my days wanting to shout "Stand up straight!" at ten minute intervals. These teen-aged girls have dowager's humps and they have barely hit puberty. They hold their necks extended, leading with their chins, and their shoulders curve around as if to meet in the center of their clavicles. It's just not healthy, but then

Item the second:

Neither is their weight. And let me tell you, I can see every ounce of extra fat rolling over their low-slung jeans, extruding out from under their cropped tops, and oozing out of their decolletage. In my day (which is to say, the sixties) not a one of those girls would ever have gotten laid, or even let out of the house with so much fat showing. And, as in primitive societies where fat is counted as a display of wealth, so it seems to me in America. These girls are blissfully unaware that a pouchy stomach, or a pair of love handles are not attractive. They parade this avoirdupois with pride. Or at least as much pride as their slumped shoulders and pigeon necks can portray.

Item the third:

Money is no object in appeasing our children. I sell, among other things, the best toy in the world: i-pods. I say they are toys because the majority of purchasers are mothers of young, nay, very young, children, and they are not buying them for their own use. They are buying $200 electronic devices for their eight-year-olds. I suggest to them that a shuffle, with no moving parts, half the cost and a storage capacity of 120 songs might be sufficient for the little darlings, but no. These mothers and grandmothers want the real deal. Just a question, but wouldn't you be better off spending that money on, say, summer camp, where the children would be out of doors, learning to oh, ride horses, or play soccer, or any other activity requiring physical movement and interaction with other children?

And why does every little monster who comes in have a cell phone clutched in their sticky little mitt? What about personal supervision in person? Not that that seems to matter because we have

Item the fourth:

A small boy, with his mother at the local grocery store. He is wearing a full Darth Vader helmet. It contains electronics to make his voice sound like the filtered basso profundo of James Earl Jones. Not to dwell on the price of such an object, or the appropriateness of letting your child wear such a thing in public, um.... if you are going to encourage your child's imagination in emulating a movie character, shouldn't you be guiding him (or her) towards the HERO? and not the slayer of innocents? Darth Vader, in case you've been living under a rock for the past thirty years, is the Bad Guy. The Very Bad Guy. Just because he repents in the third act, and kills the Emperor, he's still had a long run of being the most evil creation in the whole Star Wars saga. So, here's the question: Why would you want your six-year-old to pretend to be him? And not just pretend with a stick and a pillow case, but with very expensive, electronic toys that you had to purchase to enable him?

Conclusion

We are a nation of instantly gratified swine. We don't teach our young manners, clothing sense, correct posture, or the value of money. Our youth are indolent, arrogant and spoiled. And then we wonder why.